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The Emergence of Impartiality

This volume exposes the contested history of a virtue so central to modern disciplines and public discourse that it can seem universal. The essays gathered here, however, demonstrate the emergence of impartiality. From the early seventeenth century, the new epithet ‘impartial’ appears prominently in a wide range of publications. Contributors trace impartiality in various fields: from news publications and polemical pamphlets to moral philosophy and historical dictionaries, from poetry and drama to natural history, in a broad European context and against the backdrop of religious and civil conflicts. Cumulatively, the volume suggests that the emergence of impartiality is implicated in the period’s epochal shifts in epistemology and science, religious and political discourse, print culture, and scholarship.

Biographical note

Anita Traninger, Ph.D. (1998), is Einstein Junior Fellow at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Freie Universität Berlin. Her areas of research include the history of rhetoric and dialectics, literature and discourses of knowledge in early modern Europe, and the fact/fiction divide.

Kathryn Murphy, D.Phil. (2009), is Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oriel College, Oxford. Her research focuses on early modern English prose, discourses of knowledge, and the reception of ancient philosophy.

Readership

Those interested in the history of knowledge, the history of print culture and the mass media, aesthetics, religion, politics, literature, moral philosophy, history, natural history and the sciences.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements
Notes on the Editors
Notes on the Contributors
List of Illustrations

‘Partialitie in a Iudge, is a Turpitude’: Partial Judges and Impartial Revengers in Early Modern English Drama
DEREK DUNNE

‘Out of Books and Out of Themselves’: Invigorating Impartiality in Early Modern England
NATHAN STOGDILL
The Language of Impartiality and Party-Political Discourse in England, 1680–1745
CHRISTINE GERRARD

4. IMPARTIALITY IN CONTROVERSY

Impartiality and Disingenuousness in English Rational Religion
RHODRI LEWIS

The Rise of Controversies and the Function of Impartiality in the Early Eighteenth Century
RAINER GODEL

Objectivity, Impartiality, and Hermeneutics in the Leibnizian-Wolffian Debates between 1720 and 1750
HANNS-PETER NEUMANN

5. IMPARTIALITY AND THE HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP

Impartiality and the Early Modern ars critica: The Case of John Selden’s Historie of Tithes (1618)
NICK HARDY

Thoroughly researched contributions from conferences at Harvard and Paris on coping with ignorance in late medieval and early modern administrative practices, science, literature and the arts, are tightly connected by a new theoretical framework on how to historicize ignorance.

This volume investigates how Jesuits reflected visually and verbally on the status and functions of the imago, between the foundation of the order in 1540 and its suppression in 1773, in rhetorical and emblematic treatises, theoretical debates, and embedded in various instances where Jesuit...

Identity, Intertextuality, and Performance in Early Modern Song Culture for the first time explores comparatively the dynamic process of group formation through the production and appropriation of songs in various European countries and regions.

In Women and Curiosity in Early Modern England and France, the rehabilitation of female curiosity between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries is thoroughly investigated for the first time, in a comparative perspective that confronts two epistemological and religious traditions.

The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists in Italy, England, Scotland, and the Low Countries

Discourses of Anger offers an interdisciplinary account of how different discourses generated their own version, assessment, and semantics of anger in the early modern period. It includes contributions on philosophy and theology, poetry, medicine, law, political theory, and art.

These essays explore various inflections of the relation between image-making and incarnation doctrine. They illumine ways this fundamental mystery was construed as representable, and how it was seen to license the representation of other mysteries of faith.

The contributions to Discovering the Riches of the Word. Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe explore new approaches to the study of religious reading in a long term (from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century) and geographically broad perspective.

Conflicting Values of Inquiry explores how certain non-epistemic values had been turned into epistemic ones, how they had an effect on epistemic content, and how they became ideologies of knowledge playing various roles in inquiry and application throughout early modern Europe.